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Pepsi Cheer – Social Media Done Wrong

January 9, 2010

The Pepsi Cheer?

The Pepsi Cheer?

You’re probably doing Social Media in your Internet Marketing mix, most companies and marketers have jumped on that bandwagon faster than people become Dallas Cowboys fans when they go on a winning streak.

To be honest, chances are if you’re doing Social Media you are most likely completely wasting your time and resources because you’re doing social media badly.

No offense. But the large majority of marketers simple do not use Social Media the same way they might use other forms of media and advertising.

No ROI (Return On Investment). This can also be measured in Brand terms rather than dollar amounts.
No clear and definitive goals.
No strategy.

If you took a few hours, set up a Facebook group, Facebook fan page and Twitter feed then simply post to those profiles then you’re completely wasting your time.

Stop.
Stop Now.

Doing Social Media badly is much worse than not doing Social Media at all.

As with everything in Marketing you need to attach a value, strategy and execution plan to each and every program you put in place. If you don’t then frankly you’re Marketing badly.

Case in point.

Let's pretend this didn't happen, OK?

Let's pretend this didn't happen, OK?

The Pepsi Cheer was an abysmal failure from a Social Media standpoint and from a Marketing standpoint. Here is a good overview from Marketing Mag:

Pepsi Seeking One Million Members for Pepsi Cheer

This campaign was the brain child of the Toronto Agency Capital C (Yeah that’s right their corporate website is hosted on Typepad – very edgy).

Before we look at Pepsi’s Social Media Strategy results, let’s have a quick look at what they implemented:

On Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada#/PepsiCanada?v=app_193041964437

Twitter
http://twitter.com/PEPSICANADA

and

http://www.pepsi.ca/jointhecheer/default.aspx?bhcp=1

Here’s what Pepsi wanted to do:

  1. Create a contest to create a Cheer for Hockey Canada and the 2010 IIHF Mens’s Hockey Championship in Germany.
  2. Have the winning cheer promoted via Social Media, on television and radio.
  3. Have fans at the events use the cheer during the games to be started by Pepsi employees in the crowd (really bad idea).

The winning cheer was an annoying (in my opinion) “Eh! Oh-Canada! Go!” which was a customer submitted cheer and was then heavily promoted through advertising mediums (all listed above).

Now on a fundamental level this idea should have died in a brainstorming session. You never ever mess with the patriotism of Canadian Hockey fans. Here in Canada, Hockey is a big part of people’s sports watching mix and particularly since Canada dominates International Hockey (even though we lost in the finals to the US this past year).

The cheers Canadians have been using for years are pretty popular and there was never a need to add a new one to the mix when it was clearly a very shallow corporate marketing initiative.

Their brutal social media implementation also caused them more brand damage than had they done absolutely nothing. Pepsi and their agency failed to remember one key component of Social Media.

It’s a conversation with people. People can (and should talk back).

The Pepsi Cheer Gone Wrong

The Pepsi Cheer Gone Wrong

This is exactly what people did and it wasn’t pretty.

Let’s look at some very basic stats:

Pepsi’s Facebook Fan Page: 134,926 Fans
Pepsi Canada’s Twitter Profile: 1034 Followers

Basic Negative Results

Pepsi – I Don’t need yer damn cheer
231 members
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=259956356825

The” Eh! Oh! Canada Go!” chant is a national embarrassment
64,762 Members
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=217528662837

Twitter Search for Pepsi Cheer
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer

I’ll actually run a reputation report for this later in the week and add this to an overall case study, since this is such a blatantly bad idea.

Let’s have a quick look at why I’m saying this was not only a bad Marketing idea but it was a failure from a Social media perspective:

  1. Pepsi struck a chord with a national sport and national pride. Basically saying “You’re doing it wrong Canada”. Bad idea.
  2. Pepsi blatantly promoted themselves over simply promoting cheering for the team.
  3. Replacing the cheer was unnecessary. There are a number of cheer Pepsi could have latched onto and promoted. This likely would have gone over well.
  4. Their social media profiles simply ignored any backlash except for a few references to cheering “any cheer you want”. Too little too late.
  5. The Pepsi Canada Twitter stream did little to engage anyone talking on Twitter except for positive feedback and inane Re-Tweets about their promotion.
  6. The Pepsi Canada Twitter stream was hardly used but it was still there. Hey Pepsi Marketing Team – here’s a tip. Don’t use it if you’re going to use it badly.
  7. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer has far more negative sentiments than neutral or positive ones. Clearly Pepsi made a mistake here since they’re ignoring the fans they tried to approach. Oops that only serves to piss people off.
  8. The negative groups on Facebook almost outnumber the Fans of the Pepsi Cheer Fan Page. As a side note there is a decent set of sign up forms and calls to action on internal tabs of the fan page but there appears to be little focus to the fan page. They would have been better off to have participated in other Fan Pages (example: Hockey Canada) than to try to become the hub of Hockey Fans.
The Pepsi Cheer clearly annoying.

The Pepsi Cheer clearly annoying.

This is just the beginning of this fiasco for Pepsi in my humble opinion. They’ll be dealing with the backlash for quite sometime. Particularly since they appear to be staying the course on the same bad Social Media Strategy.

Another dumb move.

The key take aways here:

If you are going to do Social Media properly then do it properly and think about what you are doing, devote resources, a strategy and team to it.

If you think you need to have a presence on Social Networks just for the sake of being there, then you’re dead wrong.

If you are going to do a half assed job of Social Media Marketing then do yourself a favour and don’t do it at all.

Additional References

Junior Hockey Chant Falls Flat – Vancouver Sun

Traditional Cheers Given Vocal Support – Star Phoenix

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Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, Social Networking 

Comments

9 Responses to “Pepsi Cheer – Social Media Done Wrong”

  1. Vote -1 Vote +1Is Your Carbonated Beverage Social Enough? on January 14th, 2010 7:04 pm

    [...] not very classy and not as funny as was intended. In Canada, an initiative to get fans to use a Pepsi-approved cheer at the hockey events was another near miss that has left them enough negative response to dismiss any positive results [...]

  2. Vote -1 Vote +1Julio Ricardo Varela on January 18th, 2010 2:53 pm

    Exactly. The biggest challenge companies can’t seem to understand is that their ideas will always be scrutinized. If they aren’t being real about it, it is a waste of their time. Less promotion and more connection, in my opinion. Develop true relationships and don’t market your base, don’t sell them. Just id what your brand personality is and work that. Anything else is just crazy making. Nice post!

  3. Vote -1 Vote +1Matt on January 20th, 2010 1:46 pm

    Excellent analysis. However, I think you’re being too harsh. Social media is 5-10 years old (if even that). Hell Twitter wasn’t even that big 2 years ago. Mistakes are bound to be made. I think Pepsi made a huge error as well but I think they should be commended for taking a marketing risk (instead of say sticking to 30 second TV spots).

  4. Vote -1 Vote +1Dan Nedelko on January 20th, 2010 1:51 pm

    @Matt I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a major brand to put some thought into a communications strategy as it relates to social media. If anything it shows how little thought was put into this beyond “yeah that seems cool!” – any user testing on a campaign like this would have revealed the error in their strategy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not begrudging them for utilizing social media, I’m saying that their entire campaign and communication strategy was ill thought out at best. Just as a note, they ran multiple TV ad spots during prime time sporting events all over the country. Mistakes like this don’t need to happen if you’re a professional marketer and understand new media.

  5. Vote -1 Vote +1Bill on February 16th, 2010 10:04 am

    Calamity – guess they will not be using Toronto Agency Capital C again.

    Lesson to be learnt: choose your social media consultants carefully!

  6. Vote -1 Vote +1Jim Estill on February 16th, 2010 8:40 pm

    I am wondering is this is a case where any press is good press. And the fact you talked about it again just adds to that?

    Makes me feel like I should go crack a Pepsi.

  7. Vote -1 Vote +1Dan Nedelko on February 16th, 2010 8:46 pm

    @Jim I don’t really subscribe to that notion in general although I have heard of people saying the very same thing. In this case I would venture to say that the public backlash was negative enough and directly pointed at Pepsi – will this negatively affect sales? Not likely. However will it negatively affect their brand image in the Canadian market? That’s pretty much shown to be the case. Oh yeah and enjoy your Pepsi :)

  8. Vote -1 Vote +1Dan Nedelko on February 16th, 2010 8:49 pm

    @Jim Sorry forgot to reply to your second comment. I’m not trying to prevent chatter about the Pepsi campaign, from a certain perspective the kernel of the idea was not that horrible. The execution and messaging was extremely flawed, to Pepsi’s credit they tried to recover but at that point the backlash was in full swing. The fact that I talked about it only adds to the discussion which is a good thing. I’m not trying to prevent discussion, I’m much more interested in looking at the campaign and discussing it. So yeah. Mission accomplished.

  9. Vote -1 Vote +1Tommi Heinonen on March 4th, 2010 3:22 pm

    This is also a great example of giving the marketing people too much power without supervision. Without proper management there can´t be real case studies. Focus must be kept within the company.

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